As a new notion takes root in the zeitgeist one can find competing
definitions circulating in popular culture and scholarly literature.
This is especially so for what linguist Donna Gibbs (2006lc, p. 30)
called cyberlanguage, with “its own brand of quirky logic, which
evolves with unprecedented speed and variety and is heavily dependent on
ingenuity and humor.” One can see this evolution play out at Urban
Dictionary (UD), a Web repository for (over eight million) definitions
of contemporary popular culture, slang, and Internet memes. Submissions,
which include a definition and optional examples of usage, can be made
by anyone providing an email address; other contributors then vote upon
whether a definition ought to be accepted. (One word can have multiple
definitions; the term “Urban Dictionary” entry has hundreds
(Lucy2005ud).)
Because submitters are competing to get the most votes via early,
informative, or funny definitions, UD is a useful indicator of lexical
trends. UD’s earliest definition of FOMO as a type of fear is from 2005
and it simply expands the acronym and provides an example phrase “Jonny
got the rep for being a fomo, but jake’s a bigger one”
(Justinas2005fmo).
Oddly, this example is of something one is rather than something one
feels; in this, it is much closer to an older meaning of FOMO as a
“fake homosexual.” In any case, a better definition (and the most
popular one) was posted in 2006: “The fear that if you miss a party or
event you will miss out on something great”
(Beaqon2006fmo).
This definition and point in time marks the ascendancy of FOMO in
popular culture: many more definitions would appear at UD and elsewhere
in the following years. In April 2011 it was UD’s “word of the day”
(Dossey2014fdd,
p. 69).

Beyond penning definitions, lexicographers also attempt to find the
origins and early exemplars of a term. For instance, the august Oxford
Dictionary
(2014fmo)
located FOMO’s origins in the “early 21st century.” While it can be hard
to confidently identify a single point of origin, I think we can be more
precise than that. FOMO’s usage, unsurprisingly, coincides with the
launching of Facebook in 2004. In that year, Patrick Mcginnis
(2004sta), a
Harvard Business School student, wrote a light-hearted story for the
school newspaper in which he noted that the students suffered from an
array of conditions. First, FOMO led to a state of over-commitment in
which people packed a single evening with nearly a dozen events, from
Sherry tasting, to cocktails, dinners, parties, and after-parties, with
the night culminating in a drunken email at three in the morning to a
jilted friend: “Sorry I missed your 80’s theme party at Felt—you know
that you are totally in my top 15.” However, having once been burned by
missing an awesome event, one was likely to become hesitant to
committing to anything for certain, leading to FOBO: the Fear of Better
Options
(Mcginnis2004sta).
Both of these conditions then lead to yet another deleterious condition
— interestingly, all without any mention of Facebook.

FOMO and FOBO are irreconcilably opposing forces, the antithesis of
yin and yang, and can drive a person towards a paralytic state I’‘ll
call FODA, or Fear Of Doing Anything…. Notice that as a person becomes
more and more FOMO, the energy needed to maintain such an active
social life is tremendous. On the other extreme, practicing aggressive
FOBO will only serve to alienate your friends. Poor management of the
trade-off’’s between the two forces leads to FODA.
(Mcginnis2004sta)

In 2006, Twitter appeared on the scene, which led Kathy Sierra, a
popular tech blogger, to link FOMO directly to use of social media in
the following year.

Ironically, services like Twitter are simultaneously leaving some
people with a feeling of not being connected, by feeding the fear of
not being in the loop. By elevating the importance of being
“constantly updated,” it amplifies the feeling of missing something if
you’re not checking Twitter (or Twittering) with enough frequency.
(Sierra2007cpu)

(Apparently, at this point “tweeting” had not yet eclipsed
“twittering.”) In the same year, Lucy Jo Palladino
(2007fyf) dedicated a section of
her book on how to “defeat distraction and overload” to FOMO, though she
focused on examples beyond social media, such as parents’ anxiety that
their children are falling behind. Also, Business Week reported
(facetiously) that an “epidemic has hit America’s top MBA programs. At
Harvard Business School, it’s called FOMO: fear of missing out. Symptoms
include a chronic inability to turn down invitations to any party,
dinner, or junket attended by anyone who might be a valuable addition to
one’s network—no matter the cost”
(Miller2007tsl).

By 2010, FOMO was being used and spoken of broadly, and it was now
unambiguously tied to social media usage. By 2011, the phenomenon was
recognized as something that marketers could take advantage of. A report
from JWT Intelligence (“converting cultural shifts into opportunities”)
recommended that “brands can focus on easing it, escalating it, making
light of it or even turning it into a positive”
(Miranda2011fm,
p. 5, 17). About the same time marketing consultant Dan Herman created
the website fearofmissingout.com to offer his services and stake a
claim in originating term based on a 2000 paper in which he wrote about
the “consumer who is led by a new basic motivation: ambition to exhaust
all possibilities and the fear of missing out on something”;
(Herman2000ist,
p. 335; Herman2011fm). (An early
report by Herman
(2002tss) gives FOMO
greater attention, and actually uses the abbreviation, though I can’t
find any other source confirming its provenance.) In 2012, capping its
seven year ascent, the notion was recognized by the Oxford dictionaries
(2012bwa)
as the “Anxiety that an exciting or interesting event may currently be
happening elsewhere, often aroused by posts seen on a social media
website.”

In 2013, FOMO received its first scholarly attention from social psychologist Andrew Przybylskia and his colleagues (2013meb, p. 841). They defined it as “a pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent, FOMO is characterized by the desire to stay continually connected with what others are doing.” In this definition we see a recognition of an emotion (i.e., anxiety) and a characteristic behavior. This behavior of staying “continually connected” is related to Oxford’s source of the anxiety: “aroused by posts seen on a social media website.” Similarly, contemporary discussion of FOMO invokes multiple, often tangled, references to varied emotions (e.g., anxiety) and behaviors (e.g., compulsive checking). Hence, it is worthwhile to further understand what it is that people are speaking of when the lament a fear of missing out.